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Updated: June 11, 2025
To these they added a plentiful supply of clams, which they dug with sharp sticks, at low tide, far out across the sand-flats toiling for all the world like two of the identical savages who in the long ago, a thousand or five thousand years before the white man came to America, had left shell-heap middens along the north Atlantic coast.
At favorable points along the shore the Indians collected for their feasts, and these spots are now indicated by heaps of shells, in some places forming mounds of considerable size. Many interesting implements have been dug from these mounds, or kitchen middens as they are sometimes called. These holes were made for the purpose of grinding acorns or nuts.
On the one hand, the house and the garden is much tidier, less uncouth; there are flowers, such as geraniums, standard roses, those that are favourites in towns; and the unsightly and unhealthy middens and pools of muddy water have disappeared from beside the gates. But the old flowers and herbs are gone, or linger neglected in corners, and somehow the gentle touch of time has been effaced.
The larvæ were fitted together anyway, and meagerly covered with dust of wood and shreds of cloth. One big tissue of wood nearly an inch square was too great a temptation to be let alone, and during the course of my observation it covered in turn almost every group of larvæ in sight, ending by being accidentally shunted over the edge and killing a worker near the kitchen middens.
The eggs are laid in old manure heaps and kitchen middens, and the maggots, which eventually are transformed into flies, nourish themselves in those accumulations. When this refuse is rapidly and regularly removed by the care of the sanitary officials of a town, the flies diminish in number, as they have diminished in London within the last thirty years.
Such biographies give one the sense of a man diving in sewers, grubbing in middens, prying into cupboards, peeping round corners. To try as far as possible to surprise your hero, and to catch him off his guard, is a very different thing from being frank and candid. I remember once coming upon the track of one of these ghouls.
Small bays with sandy beaches white with broken clam shells mark the shore, and if across the beach a stream of crystal water rippled to the sea, one Indian lodge or more was sure to be erected on the rising land behind; for Indians always choose to build their homes on sheltered sandy bays where pure fresh water runs, and so in years which are among those past and gone one could not fail to see the blue wood smoke of Indian fires hanging like gauze above the little bays; but most are now deserted and corner posts of old time houses alone are seen, and beds of stinging nettle cover ancient kitchen middens, and spirea and elderberry strive for space where once red strips of salmon hung in the smoke of punk-wood fires, and stillness reigns where once the Indians' mournful song was heard.
The king's highway, as I have related in the foregoing, ran through the Vennel, which was a narrow and a crooked street, with many big stones here and there, and every now and then, both in the spring and the fall, a gathering of middens for the fields; insomuch that the coal-carts from the Douray moor were often reested in the middle of the causey, and on more than one occasion some of them laired altogether in the middens, and others of them broke down.
An examination showed that this was a second, nearer dumping-ground for all the garbage and refuse of the swarm which could not be thrown down on the kitchen middens far below. And here were tiny flies and other insects acting as scavengers, just as the hosts of vultures gather about the slaughter-house of Georgetown.
A tremendous sea ran high on the bar at Tynemouth, and rolled with tremendous force on the Black Middens rocks that are black indeed, in their history as well as their aspect. A barque was seen making for the Tyne, towed by a steam-tug. A sudden squall struck them; the tug was forced to let the vessel go, and she went on the rocks.
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